


what I need is a good defense

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Clone Wars as History, F/F, Lesbians in Space, Male-Female Friendship, Mando'a Language (Star Wars), Original Trilogy as Politics, Past Relationship(s), The Mandalorian (TV) Season 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:54:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28051236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Cara, Fennec, and common ground.
Relationships: Boba Fett & Fennec Shand, Cara Dune/Fennec Shand, Cara Dune/Omera, Din Djarin & Boba Fett, Din Djarin & Cara Dune
Comments: 18
Kudos: 138





	what I need is a good defense

Din had got inside his head again, and got stuck there. Cara recognised the signs. She’d seen it before, when Omera had offered Din and the baby a home and Din had crashed like a cheap datapad, and when they found the recording in Moff Gideon’s outpost and they had all glimpsed the horrors the Empire had put the baby through. For _twenty-five years._

“He always this much of a grouch?” Fennec said, watching Din stew in a corner of the _Slave I_. It was a ship meant to house two people at best, and it was an extremely tight fit right now - though no worse, Cara seemed to remember, than the _Razor Crest_ , which had apparently been blown to smithereens. 

That alone would explain Din’s bad mood, given the ship had been his only home for years, but Cara was getting to know the body language he used in place of expressions, and - no, it wasn’t what was on his mind now.

“Nah,” Cara said. 

Fennec slid a look sideways. Cara raised her eyebrows.

Din got up and went up to the cockpit without saying a word. Cara heard, distantly, the sound of him speaking a language that sounded like Mandalorian. Cara could guess at individual words, but only a very few of them.

Fennec glanced up like she felt that the conversation was some kind of cue to clear out, and then got unhurriedly to her feet. She never looked like she was in a hurry, Cara had noticed; the perfect sniper, in the right place at the right time, never rushed, never taking a single ill-considered shot.

“You want a drink?” Fennec said, leaving another offer unspoken. 

“Sure,” Cara said, and got up and followed her to her bunk.

Din and Cara had been sleeping on the _Slave I_ ’s bench seats, or - more accurately - taking it in turns to nap and to watch Mayfeld. The man was a small-time miserable bastard, and would be making trouble as soon as he got over the ridgeline, if you asked Cara. But he’d apparently given Din solid cover in the base itself, and he’d done good work hitting the rhydonium; you only needed to see a planet scarred by that stuff once to want every last drop of it scrubbed from the galaxy. He knew too much about the Imperial Remnant for Cara’s trust, but then again, he’d never be able to rejoin them if he tried, and taking him back to the labour camp would be the same kind of death sentence, only slightly faster.

Cara had wished death on Mayfeld pretty frequently over the last few days, given the number of favours she’d had to call in and the amount of brown-nosing she’d had to do to get him on work-release, and exactly how poorly that stacked up against the cowardice he’d shown and his inability to stop running his fucking mouth, but… she didn’t think he deserved to be torn apart. The guard droids didn’t interfere in prisoner fights if they didn’t see them, and Mayfeld’s buddies would have seen to it that there were no witnesses at all.

“You should have shot that sleemo,” Fennec said casually, like she was reading Cara’s mind. Cara twitched before she could stop herself. “He’ll just make more trouble down the line.”

  
  
“Died in the explosion,” Cara replied. “I told you.”  
  
  


Fennec’s mouth quirked. “Sure,” she said. She pressed her palm against the door, and it slid open. The bunk was very small, hardly room to turn around: a place to sleep and store a few belongings, rather than a refuge. Cara noted the medical equipment in the corner, the small medical-grade chiller, the toolbox and powered-down med-droid.

“Seems like the health benefits in this gig are pretty good,” she said. Din had mentioned that when he’d last seen Fennec Shand he’d thought her dead, but he hadn’t specified what of. 

Fennec unzipped her jacket and pulled up her shirt casually. A solid slice of her abdomen was metal.

Cara whistled. “That’s gotta hurt.”

“It didn’t,” Fennec said blandly. “Not enough.” She raised her eyebrows at Cara. “That’s why I knew I was dying.”

“Pretty lively for a dead woman.” 

Fennec laughed, and opened the chiller. Her back shielded its contents from Cara’s eyes, but she took out a bottle of something, heavy glass heavily engraved, and pulled two enamelled metal cups the size of thermal detonators from a cupboard set into the wall. She poured two measures out, and handed one to Cara. The alcohol’s scent hit the back of Cara’s nostrils like a tank hitting a cliff.

“Can you still drink that?” Cara asked. She waited until Fennec drank to take a sip, and blinked. It burned all the way down, but in a good way. 

Fennec shrugged. “It doesn’t get into my blood the same way. But yes. I can drink it.”

“You’re gonna drink me under the table.”

Fennec’s smirk passed over her face like lightning over a clear sky. “I thought droppers were better than that.” She sat down on the bed, back against the wall, and invited Cara to join her with a strangely elegant gesture of one hand. “So how do you know our shiny, angry friend? You were the first person he thought of asking for help when the kid was taken.”

Cara’s heart twisted. She sat down, and hoped the motion made her expression less clear. “Met him on a backwater planet,” she said. “He’d just fostered the kid. He was looking for a quiet life.”

“With the whole fucking Imperial Remnant after him?”

“He didn’t know how bad they wanted the kid,” Cara said, remembering the bounty hunter she’d found in the woods, the one she’d killed without hesitation. Now there was a face that didn’t feature in her bad dreams. “When he found out, he came and asked me for help again.” She shrugged. “I don’t need an excuse to go after Imps. It was more than I bargained for, but hell. We got out alive.”

“Such a good little Rebel.” There was a hint of bite in Fennec’s words, and Cara let her head loll against the wall until she turned it sideways, and caught Fennec’s eye.

“I’m Alderaanian,” she said. “A lot of people never paid for what they did. I’m always happy to get a chance to present the bill.”

Fennec’s lip curled. “True,” she said. She broke Cara’s gaze, and sipped at her drink. “I was from Christophsis. One of the planets the Old Republic never managed to hold all the way.”

Cara thought of a war fought by droids and armies of faceless men, Jedi dancing on the fine line of possibility, playing futile games of tug-of-war while the real threat lay in wait. Fennec must be a few years older than her; Cara didn’t remember the fall of the Republic. 

“Fucking shit,” she said. “Do you think it ever stops?”

“No,” Fennec said cynically. “But I think you want to believe it will, Rebel.” She elbowed Cara in the side. “Drink up. What are you scared of?”

“What would you like me to be scared of?” Cara retorted, and Fennec gave her a grin like a knifeblade. Cara drank a toast to her.

“I first met Mando in a cantina,” she said. “I thought he was Guild with a fob on me. He thought I was Guild with a fob on the kid. We attacked each other, fought to a stalemate.” She shrugged. “And then he bought me a drink.”

“The last of the great romantics,” Fennec observed. Cara inhaled her drink instead of drinking it, and sneezed laughing.

“You’d need a tin-opener to get him out of that kit,” she said. “Hell of a lot of effort for someone who isn’t my style.”

“So what is your style?”

“Women who shoot well,” Cara said. The words rolled off her tongue easier than they would have done without the alcohol.

Fennec laughed. "And you find them easy to come by, in peacetime?" Her cool voice lilted mockingly over the word _peacetime_. "Marshal?"

"Well, you're the second I've met in the last year," Cara drawled. Fennec poured herself another drink, and Cara shook her head at the offer. 

"Really," Fennec said, sitting back down. Whatever they were drinking didn't affect her as fast as it affected Cara, but it was still making an impact; Cara could see the faintest flush on her high cheekbones. "And what happened to the first one? She left you?"

"I left her," Cara said. She took another drink from her enamelled cup, and smiled to take the edge off it. "Me and my shiny friend cleared a bunch of bandits using Imperial kit off that backwater planet. She was the headwoman of the village who hired us."

"Sleeping with your boss," Fennec said. "Bad form."

Cara thought fleetingly of dark eyes and strong hands. "Sort of," she said, and then shrugged. "I had a fob out on me, and we made a lot of noise getting rid of the bandits."

Fennec made a disbelieving sound.

"We took out an AT-AT," Cara said, and watched Fennec's face change, grudgingly impressed. "Someone was bound to show up for me, and she had people to protect, so I cleared out." Be shrugged again.

"Broken heart in need of consolation?" Fennec said, silky soft and mean as a viper. "I'm not flattered. Your standards can't be all that high, if you think my shooting matches up to some small-town mayor."

Cara surprised herself by laughing so hard she had to put the cup down before she dropped it. Fennec's face slid through annoyance, to confusion, to a kind of reserved judgement; she sat back slightly, and eyed Cara clinically.

"So she was very, _very_ good," Fennec said. "At least, good enough to compare. Where did she learn that? I don't know anyone in the Guild as good as me. Do you reckon she was a freelancer gone straight?"

She sounded jealous - not of Omera, but of her own reputation. Cara made a point of changing the subject.

"Oh, I can promise you she wasn't straight." Cara wiped her eyes. "I think she served somewhere in the last war. I didn't ask her where. She didn't tell me. It's a big galaxy." She picked her cup back up. "So how did you end up running with Fett? And do you know what the hell they're talking about?"

"Partisan, maybe," Fennec mused. "Or Friends of Paran. Hmm." She shook her head. "I've known Fett for years. We go way back. Jabba Desilijc Tiure used to keep him on retainer. I worked for a different branch of the family. We used to pass unofficial messages, the days when our employers weren't trying to kill each other." 

"Retainer, huh."

Fennec nodded. "Expensive. And the last instalments were already paid when Leia Organa wrenched Jabba's miserable head off his neck and the Hutts got overthrown, so Fett didn't suffer too much. He's been on his own since the Clone Wars, he likes to be sure he's got his feet under him."

"He can't have been that young." Cara didn't know much about Boba Fett, save for a few outsized legends and the fact that Han Solo had accidentally knocked him into a sarlacc pit while still mostly blind from the carbon freezing, but he looked to be in his fifties, with thick grey scarring across his face. Maybe the scarring was tipping the scales.

"Ten," Fennec said. "Or thereabouts. According to some... relatives of his I tangled with, once."

That put Fett at mid to late thirties, depending on when his guardian had died. Well, shit. "Tatooine must be pretty bad for the skin, then," Cara said aloud, tucking away the snippet Fennec had so deliberately let fall about Fett's relatives. It was an obvious lure. "He looks older."

"Sarlacc acid doesn't come recommended," Fennec said dryly. "Any more than getting shot in the stomach does." She tapped her fingers idly on her thigh. "You know, if it hadn't been for the man in the beskar, I would've got that little stupa before he came close enough to shoot me."

"Oh yeah?" Cara said idly. Fennec leaned back and put her feet in Cara's lap. 

"Yeah," she said, eyes half-lidded, watching Cara under her lashes. 

Cara looked sideways at the closed door. "Reckon we'll be interrupted?"

"No," Fennec said. "Fett finds someone he doesn't dislike to talk Mando'a with, he'll keep talking for days. He thinks highly of your shiny friend."

"Oh yeah?" Cara repeated, laying a light hand on Fennec's ankle and watching her expression change, very slightly.

Fennec nodded. "So we may as well entertain themselves while they gossip."

"Sounds good to me," Cara said, sliding her hand up Fennec's leg, and Fennec smiled, lazy and pleased. "So Rebels are your style, then?"

"No," Fennec said, crooking an imperious finger at Cara, and grabbing Cara by the shirt and dragging her in when Cara came closer. "I like women who shoot well, too. Maybe I should look out for this sharpshooting headwoman."

Cara imagined Fennec on Sorgan, the damp and the mould getting into her prosthetics, the farming village in the sticks, Omera welcoming her blandly and then (almost certainly) immediately shooting her in the back with weapons salvaged from the raiders. She grinned against Fennec's mouth. "Over your dead body," she said. "Stick to the Hutts. It's safer."

Fennec Shand laughed.

  
  
  



End file.
